A scrounger…almost died after cutting his own foot off so he could stay on jobless benefits… Long term unemployed Hans Url, 56, had just been told his hand-outs would stop if he did not accept work found for him by job centre staff. And when his claims that he was too sick and did not like the work were challenged with the offer of a medical, he took drastic measures. …Url, of Mitterlabill, southern Austria, rigged up a mitre saw and sliced off his foot – then put it in the oven for good measure to ensure no surgeon could reattach it. …The police added that the man had almost died from loss of blood before the emergency services arrived and that they had recovered the foot from the oven – but that it had been too badly burned to reattach.

This story is so absurd that I wonder whether it is an April Fool’s prank. But the Daily Mail is a serious newspaper in England, and the story is dated March 27, not April 1. And there are also version of the story on Yahoo and at the Austrian Times. So it appears it might be true.

Not that we should be too surprised, because we also have an American version of the Klondike Bar contest, only this one asks, “What would you do to get a disability check?”

Here’s some of what I wrote last May about Stanley Thornton, a.k.a. Diaper Man, also known as Adult Baby.

The latest outrage is a 30-year old man who pretends to be an infant, and his roommate, who pretends to be his mother. I don’t care that he wears diapers and she changes them. I don’t care that he weighs 350 pounds. I wouldn’t care if I found out that they have sex with turtles and eat horse manure. As a libertarian, I genuinely believe people should be free to do anything that doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. But I care very much that they are scamming taxpayers. In a typical display of government incompetence, both of them have convinced the Social Security Administration to give them disability payments.

What’s really tragic about these examples is that the people involved presumably are mentally ill. Or at least they are very disturbed.

I have no idea if the welfare state made their problems worse, but it’s also a safe assumption to say that handouts didn’t make them better. And they definitely didn’t promote responsibility and good behavior.

In any event, Stanley Thornton and Hans Url are screwed-up people, so we shouldn’t extrapolate from their odd behavior.